Why Attend?

Red-baiting is the battering ram that corporate America wields when even the smallest democratic reforms threaten its power. Too often, even progressives distance themselves for fear of being squashed. To erode that power and build toward a truly just economy and society, we build a visible socialist presence within grassroots democratic movements and with a credible socialist voice in policy debates.

Over the last two years, we have continued renewing and revitalizing our organization to meet the challenge of making the socialist tradition relevant to the twenty-first century United States. We have grown our membership, and new DSA locals and YDS chapters have organized.

But we have much more work to do. Our message has never been more important.

Attend the convention to:

Get to know fellow members from around the country, share activism best-practices, and build democratic socialist community

Discuss and debate our strategy in a rapidly changing political environment

Elect our national leadership for the next two years

Develop your democratic socialist organizing skills

See dynamic speakers like Tom Hayden, John Nichols, Catherine Tactaquin and Steve Williams

Join Steve Max, a founder of the legendary community organizing school, the Midwest Academy, to practice talking about socialism in plain language. Create your own short rap. Use your personal experience and story to explain democratic socialism. Prepare for those conversations about socialism that happen when you table or canvass. This workshop is for those who have already had an introduction to democratic socialism, whether from DSA's webinar or from other sources. Questions? Contact Theresa Alt <talt@igc.org> 607-280-7649.

DSA was concerned to find out that the company that provides our website and online organizing infrastructure, NationBuilder, had as a client the Trump campaign and other right-wing candidates. Progressives built this kind of infrastructure and tools for digital organizing and we have now lost that organizing edge. We are moving to identify other options for a CMS/CRM. As an under-resourced, member funded organization, this move will take time for us to carry out, but it is an important statement for us to make.